There is a certain hairdresser in my city, we call him the Barber Nazi.  He's very eccentric, introducing himself as an artesian barber from Cuba with a long family history lineage of mad-coiffeuse skills. I assume the way he waxes philosophic about his god-like scissor skills that he was the personal cosmetologist for Fidel Castro and his hermano Raul.

This beautician of the stars talks about the most inappropriate topics to his customers, complete with inappropriate magazines. The vibe is definitely old school, circa 1950s. I found his TMI (too much information) style of talking to be very entertaining, but I'm sure I'm the minority. A few years ago, I shaved my head in cancer solidarity for a friend. Senor Barbero asked if I was "going to cry like a little girl" when he was to apply straight alcohol to my freshly shaven dome. In addition, a tourist wandered into his barber shop and asked if he took walk-ins, to where Senor Ego actually said, "Why do you assume you can just walk in and be my client?" This got me wondering how businesses attract and keep customers.

We have a saying in our office to always strive to make things  simple, "crayons and puppets." The point is to make everything you do simple. Simplicity is really hard to do sometimes. As Steve Job's correctly observed, "Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains." Clarity is the art of genius.

Apple recently reported quarterly net profit of $18.02 billion; the largest reported by a public company, worldwide, ever.  So I think Mr. Jobs was on to something regarding simplicity. To put that in perspective, Apple's revenue of $65.2 billion is bigger than Ecuador's GNP of $58.9 billion.  If Apple were a country, it would rank as the world's 68th biggest according to Fortune, CNN Money and the IMF. Interestingly enough, Walmart would be the 25th largest "country," bigger than Norway. Who says family businesses can't succeed?

I just finished reading The Art of Stillness - Adventures in Going Nowhere by Pico Iyer. He suggests as our world speeds up, there's a commensurate desire to slow down, to unplug, a secular Sabbath, to simplify. It's an age-old practice of sitting with no goal in mind and no destination in sight. It sounds simple, but it can be challenging to our results-oriented world. Try this experiment. Go to a crowded store you normally go to, but make sure you don't need to buy anything. Just walk the aisles and observe.  If you're lucky you might experience passive awareness and start to see things you never have, like other hurried, stressed and impatient shoppers in a state of anxiousness to meet some internal deadline. Simple exercise, but hard to do.

When I designed our report writing program Edge, I first talked to many appraisers about other products they were using. I heard the same thing over and over, "It has to be simple to use."  Many appraisers purchased solutions and never used them, because they said they were too difficult to implement. However, report writing adoption by commercial appraisers has recently increased substantially. More competitiveness and declining fees were cited in many instances. Make things simple for your appraisers and support staff, provide them ALL the tools to do their job.

Make it simple to be your customer. Do all the things you know you should do: expeditiously return all phone calls, follow-up on all appraisal bids, communicate to your client throughout the appraisal process, and promptly address any client questions with patience and professionalism. If a customer is not familiar with the appraisal process, then patiently explain it to them with follow-up communication.  Exceed expectations. Customers have to find you, communicate with you and pay you, so spend money and time on SEO and a good CRM.  

Dr. Debasish Mridham, a neurologist and poet, says it well, "Our main purpose of life is to be happy.  Happiness is in simplicity, and the most amazing things about life is that it is so simple."  If it were only that simple.  

 

On February 4th, it was reported that mega health insurer Anthem suffered a data breach, where personal information of clients and employees was compromised over a period of months.  Chinese state sponsored hackers are suspect numero uno at this point in time.  What is notable about this particular breach, is the break from the norm of highly publicized recent data breaches (Target, Home Depot, the list goes on and on,) in which the stolen data was payment card information.  In the Anthem breach, payment card information was not compromised although Social Security numbers, names, addresses, email addresses, income and employment information was stolen - the exact count of people affected is still unknown, while it is expected to be in the tens of millions.

There are several take-aways from the post-mortem analysis that are applicable to all organizations, even those that are not Goliath sized enterprises.  While Anthem applied appropriate encryption methods for other types of client data they housed, they failed to do so for the ("less" important) stolen goods.  Securing your client data is a fine tuned dance of establishing a happy medium between ease of access to necessary information, whilst maintaining measures keep it safe.  Any personally identifiable information can be valuable in the wrong hands, even if it is not payment card data and does not fall under the ominous realm of PCI compliance (the information stolen in the Anthem hack is currently being used in identify theft rings and to launch phishing campaigns against high profile individuals whose information was stolen.) 

The key to establishing best practices for your organization's data security is to first understand exactly what client and employee information you are housing and WHY that information might be valuable or enticing to nefarious entities.  Once an understanding and respect for the private information your organization maintains is reached, baseline procedures to ensure the availability, confidentiality and integrity of your data can be implemented by members of your organization or by outside security consultants. Do not underestimate the data that you have and do not think that your organization is too small to become a target.